BIG RAPIDS — A Northern Michigan teen, concerned about the amount of time he and his peers are spending online is trying to stop the trap of endless scrolling.
The 8th grader at St Mary’s Catholic School in Big Rapids has started up a website to show kids new fun activities while highlighting the goal of promoting screen free, creative learning. He said he wants to help other kids get offline and back into the real world.
“Seeing a one minute reel or one minute TikTok is a lot more engaging than learning a skill over 30 days. You see the instant things and it’s very entertaining. It is. But the truth is, after like two hours of doing that, you get off of it and you feel terrible about it,” said Hinkley.
14 year old Andrew Hinkley said he started noticing he wasn’t using his time productively, spending hours online with nothing to show for it.
“I think the average social media usage per day is like at least four hours per teen. We could be using that time to to be growing businesses, growing websites, and just growing in so many things,” said Hinkley.
He said he has spent the past two months building SpendSomeTime.org and launched it two weeks ago.
Andrew said he coded the website himself with a little help from technology.
“I have used some AI tools like GitHub Copilot, which allows me to code a lot faster, obviously, so I don’t have to do everything manually. And over the past few weeks, I’ve just been kind of polishing up and adding new features and stuff to make it more fun,” said Hinkley.
He said he’s self taught, from playing instruments, juggling, cards tricks, and coding.
“I’m just taught off of YouTube videos and things online. I have no teacher, nothing in school or anything,” said Hinkley.
He said the website can track new skills, set learning goals and offers over 250 hands-on activities that kids can do.
“Something like a Rubik’s Cube, you can learn mental tricks to just, like, impress people and stuff. You can learn dance moves. You could learn juggling, which is something I’ve learned. You could learn card tricks,” said Hinkley.
Andrew said the website is free and kids can do the activities with minimal equipment or additional apps.
“I think a lot of kids want to want to learn things, but they just don’t want to ask their parents to buy them the stuff or they don’t want to buy the stuff or they just can’t buy the stuff,” said Hinkley.
He said he hopes to grow the website into an organization where kids can share what they are doing.
“I think it would be really cool if people could learn these skills and, and show them off to other people, and then they can learn skills,” said Hinkley.
Angela Denny, a teacher at St. Mary’s, who has had Andrew as a student in the past and coaches him in math counts and quiz bowl, said she’s not surprised. She says that’s totally Andrew’s style.
“He’s an incredible kid. He has a great mind. Very, very much a sponge and always seeking knowledge. Always seeking knowledge and what he has for knowledge is incredible for someone of his age,” said Denny.